The Sirena Quest

by Michael A. Kahn

  “Also fake?” Lou asked.

  Gabe nodded. “A detective agency eventually determined that it came from a photograph in his college yearbook. The forger transposed it onto a body in the concert crowd.”

  “Incredible,” Gordie said.

  “It was more than just incredible,” Gabe said. “It was vicious because it sealed Pritchard’s lips.”

  “Why?” Gordie asked.

  “The fakes looked authentic, and that was the rub. Pritchard was afraid that friends and colleagues would think they were real. It’s like the babysitter accused of child-molesting. Even if the charges are dropped, you’re going to have trouble getting more babysitting jobs. Same for Pritchard. In order to clear his reputation he’d have to risk destroying it.”

  “What did he do?” Lou asked.

  Eventually, Gabe explained, Pritchard showed the file to one of his old colleagues at the Justice Department, who quietly looked into it. The mechanics of the prank were even more elaborate than Pritchard had suspected. The Department of Defense had given him security clearance. But someone had intercepted the clearance letter before it was mailed and replaced it with a fake denial. As for the FBI, they had no record of any Freedom of Information Act request from Pritchard, which meant that somehow the request had been diverted before it was docketed at the FBI. Furthermore, the FBI had nothing in the slightest bit incriminating in their actual file on him.

  Obsessed, Pritchard hired a detective agency. It was inconceivable to him that anyone could pull off such an elaborate ruse without leaving a loose end. But after more than a year of investigation, the detective agency came up with nothing linking Marshall, or anyone else, to the scheme. Nevertheless, Pritchard was convinced that his old squash nemesis was the mastermind. He confronted him at an ABA meeting. Marshall laughed and told him he was crazy.

  “So who did it?” Gordie asked.

  Gabe smiled. “That’s why I told you I didn’t think Marshall’s private papers would help you.”

  “Why?” Ray asked.

  “When Marshall died,” Gabe said, “his executor found a large sealed envelope in one of his safe deposit boxes. The envelope was addressed to Brendan Pritchard with instructions to mail it to him by registered mail. The executor followed the instructions. Inside that envelope Pritchard found a fake photograph of himself shaking hands with Adolph Hitler. Stapled to the photograph was a sheet of paper from Graham Marshall’s memo pad. One of those ‘From the Desk of’ pads. Handwritten on the paper was one word.”

  “What?” Lou asked.

  “Gotcha,” Gabe said.

  Gordie leaned back in his chair. “Wow.”

  Gabe nodded. “You see my point? Marshall had to make sure Brendan Pritchard found out it was him. His ego was too big to let a hoax like that go unclaimed. And that was just a private prank. This statue is a big deal. I saw the article on it in the Wall Street Journal. If Marshall went to that length to claim credit for what he did to Pritchard, he’d definitely make sure he got full credit for hiding the statue.”

  “But how?” Ray asked.

  “Exactly what I asked myself after Lou called,” Gabe said. “The best way for Marshall to prove he was the one who hid the statue is to tell the finder where to look for it.”

  “How would he do that now?” Ray asked.

  Gabe looked down at the notes on his legal pad. “Copy this down.” He read off a nine-digit number. “Go over to the Probate Court Clerk’s office at the Daley Center and ask for that file. It’s a thick one.”

  “Marshall’s probate file?” Lou said.

  Gabe nodded. “It’s a public file. The key word is ‘public.’ If he’s the one who hid the statue, your best bet is to start with that file.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was Ray’s idea, of course.

  They’d just boarded the down elevator after their meeting with Gabe Pollack. As the doors slid shut, Ray turned to face them, eyebrows raised.

  “What?” Lou asked.

  “We can’t see the court clerk, yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “We got something to do first, boys.”

  “Huh?” Gordie asked. He was distracted, trying to cook up an excuse for getting out of his business lunch.

  “We ain’t the James Gang, yet.” Ray was grinning. “Not ’til we liberate Bronco Billy.”

  On the taxi ride to Columbia Middle School on the northwest side of Chicago, Gordie and Ray worked out their scenario: Bronco Billy was under consideration for one of those MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants. They were the team of psychologists assigned to administer the personality tests required to determine his eligibility. It sounded ridiculous to Lou, but he was along for the ride—literally.

  They were ushered into the principal’s office. Behind a metal desk sat a corpulent man in his late fifties. The desktop was bare except for a BIC pen, a black rotary-dial telephone, and a tarnished brass nameplate announcing that the man behind the desk was Dr. Harold N. Silverfrick, Ph.D. With his bulging eyes, scraggly mustache, and sagging double chin, Silverfrick reminded Lou of an enormous catfish. His toupee was slightly askew. Judging from his sideburns, the rug was one shade darker than his real hair. His plaid sports jacket was buttoned, the ends of his shirt collars curled upward, and the thick knot of his tie was out of line.

  Gordie, who had dressed for work that morning and thus was in a suit and tie, handled the introductions. He was Dr. Cohen. Dr. Gorman was the gentlemen in the khaki slacks and a green Polo shirt. Dr. Solomon was the man in faded Levi’s and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

  Gordie gave an inspired performance, salting his shpiel with plenty of allusions to the Ying and Yang of American educational theory, namely, the “cognitive domain” and the “affective domain.”

  “Nice job, Doc,” Ray told him as they walked up the stairs to the second floor.

  They crowded by the door to Room 210 and peered through the glass. There were five long rows of desks facing the front, seven desks per row. A green-red-and-yellow donkey piñata hung from the middle of the ceiling fan. On the walls were brightly colored posters from Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, and Argentina. The blackboard was filled with Spanish words and phrases.

  And there was Bronco Billy—just as skinny and pale as he’d been freshman year. He was leaning over a boy’s desk in the back row, pointing out something in a workbook. He wore a short-sleeved blue dress shirt, a dark bow-tie, and pleated khaki slacks. He even had on the same style of metal-rimmed glasses—the ones that dug red trenches on both sides of his large nose.

  Lou watched through the glass, smiling as Billy curled a finger around a strand of his lank brown hair. It was a gesture Lou had seen Billy do hundreds of times their freshman year—while studying calculus in the dorm room with his headphones on and bobbing his head over the textbook, while moving through the food line in the dining hall, while standing to the side during a Hampton College mixer.

  Ray gestured at Bronco Billy, who had just noticed that there was a crowd at his classroom door.

  “Come on,” Ray hissed, waving his arm.

  Billy squinted toward the door and then straightened in surprise. He grinned and held up his hands in a helpless gesture as he looked around the classroom.

  Ray signaled for him to join them.

  Billy paused, and then he turned toward the class. He made an announcement. All heads looked toward the door, where the three of them had assumed serious expressions. After all, they were doctors of psychology here on official business. Billy walked to the head of the class, flipped through a few pages of a textbook, gave them an assignment, and headed for the door.

  Out in the hall, he grinned and shook their hands.

  “What are you guys doing here?”

  “Liberating you, gringo,” Ray said. “Dr. Silverfish says you can leave w
hen this period ends. He’s sending up a substitute.”

  Billy looked puzzled. “How’d you do that?”

  Lou explained the MacArthur Foundation shtick.

  Billy chuckled. “You told him all that?”

  Ray slapped him on the back. “Trust me, Bronco, you got something to do that’s more important than teaching those jarheads how to conjugate Spanish verbs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sirena,” Lou said.

  Ray gave Billy a wink. “We’re on a mission, Señor.”

  Gordie groaned. “No missions, Ray.”

  Billy raised his eyebrows. “You guys know where she is?”

  “Not yet,” Gordie said.

  “But we’re in the hunt,” Ray said.

  The school bell rang. From inside the classroom came the sounds of textbooks closing and students getting up.

  “¿Vamos, Señor Bronco?” Ray asked.

  Billy hesitated.

  “Come on,” Gordie said. He nodded toward Lou and Ray. “These guys have already hijacked my day. Your turn.”

  Billy shrugged. “Okay.”

  Bronco, Lou repeated with a smile as Billy ducked back into the classroom to gather his stuff.

  Billy had started college as William McCormick. Not Bill or Will or Willie. William was the only name he’d been called since birth, and that remained the case until parents’ weekend during the fall of their freshman year. His mother and father flew in from Shaker Heights for the event. On Saturday night, they invited their son’s three roommates—all sans parents that weekend—to join them for supper at the Josiah Barrett Inn. During the meal, Mrs. McCormick passed around baby photographs of William while her only son frowned at his plate.

  Later that night—much, much later—on the lawn behind Barrett Inn, long after Mommy and Father had retired for the evening and shortly after downing his eighth beer, William confessed his dark secret. Even though Father expected him to join the State Department after graduation and then return to Cleveland to enter the family merchant banking business, what he really, really, really wanted to do, what he’d dreamed about since childhood, was to move to Montana to become a rodeo cowboy.

  He’d passed out just moments after that confession. As they would later discover, the closest he’d come to riding the range was on his ninth birthday, when his parents took him to the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky and bought him two rides on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel. Nevertheless, as young William McCormick lay in a stupor on the lawn behind Barrett Inn, Ray Gorman announced that henceforth William would be known as Bronco Billy—a nickname so incongruous it stuck.

  Billy emerged from the classroom with a sheepish grin, his sports jacket folded over one arm.

  Ray put an arm around his shoulders as they headed down the hall. “We’ll fill you in at lunch, Bronco.”

  To his occasionally exasperated roommates freshman year, Billy had been the quintessence of predictability. Majored in economics, minored in political science—just like Father. Ran on the cross country team—just like Father. Started studying to take the foreign service exam that was three years into the future—just like Father, who spent two years at Foggy Bottom before being assigned to the United States Embassy in Lima. After ten years, Father retired from the service and parlayed his overseas connections into a partnership at an investment banking firm in Cleveland. That was Bronco’s career path, too.

  Or so it seemed. After college and two years in D.C., he received his first overseas assignment: attaché to the political section of the United States Embassy in Managua, Nicaragua.

  But then Bronco Billy veered off his career path.

  Literally.

  And permanently.

  As the four of them were walking down the front stairs of the school, Billy stopped.

  Lou turned to look back at him. “What?”

  Billy was grinning. “It’s just great to see all you guys together.”

  As they piled into Lou’s van, Gordie shouted, “The James Gang is back!”

  They’d named themselves after their dormitory, James Hall. Ray had been the gruff platoon leader, Gordie the manic-depressive joker, and Bronco Billy the good-natured nerd.

  And just like freshman year, Lou thought, here they were dragging Bronco along. If asked, Bronco would always tag along—say, to the basement TV room on a Sunday afternoon to join the throng of freshmen watching the Celtics-Knicks game. But as the crowd grew more raucous, as more pretzels and beers were downed, as Bradley or Frazier hit one from the head of the key with less than a minute left and the New Yorkers roared and the Celtics fans cursed, you’d turn to say something to Billy…and he’d be gone. And when the game ended and you’d returned to the room with Gordie or Ray, laughing as you opened the door, there he’d be, hunched over his desk, head bobbing slowly to the beat in his headphones as he underlined a passage in his calculus textbook. And more often then not, Ray would grab his headphones, knock the books off his desk, and drag him out for another adventure.

  They did it because it was their duty. As Ray explained to Lou one night on their way to the library to haul Billy out for a field trip to a reggae club in Springfield, “Think of what’s waiting for that poor bastard—house in the ’burbs, mowing the lawn on Saturday, rooting for the Browns on Sunday, doing it missionary style once a week with the lights out. Hell, man, we gotta make sure Bronco puts in a little time on the dark side of the moon before that happens.”

  Little did they suspect what the fates had in store for their boring roommate.

  As Lou pulled away from the curb, he glanced at Billy in the rearview mirror. Despite all that had happened to him since college, he looked the same as he had on that September afternoon twenty-four years ago when Lou returned from lunch to discover his new roommate unpacking a box of Foreign Affairs.

  It seemed almost an optical illusion. How could you go through so much and change so little? How could such upheavals inside leave no trace outside?

  Lou glanced over at Ray—a man who’d weathered a pharmacopoeia of controlled substances, a violent failed stint in grad school, a wretched marriage, two years in a Telluride commune, the rigors of the Southern California cocaine trade, and other assaults on body and spirit with no visible impact beyond a few gray hairs at the temples, reading glasses in the breast pocket, and twenty-five extra pounds around the middle.

  Clearly, there was some fundamental lesson here. But what it was, Lou had no clue.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lou gazed at the assistant probate court clerk and tried to keep his tone unruffled. “Okay, sir, and where would the file be?”

  The assistant probate clerk scratched his ample belly as he stared at Lou. “I cannot say for sure.”

  “Why is that?”

  The clerk had a grave expression, as if pondering the mysteries of the cosmos. “The presiding judge could have it if there’s a hearing scheduled. Someone could have checked it out. Or—”

  He shrugged.

  “Or what?” Lou said.

  The assistant probate clerk raised his eyebrows. “It could be missing.”

  “Missing?” Ray said. “How can an entire goddamned probate file be missing?”

  The four of them were in the Office of the Clerk of the Probate Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, which was located on the twelfth floor of the Daley Center in the Chicago Loop.

  The assistant probate court clerk—a fat, bald, middle-aged white man in a white short-sleeve shirt and dark wrinkled slacks—stifled a yawn. “It happens, gentlemen. Yes, indeed, it happens. You are now standing inside the filing area for the biggest and busiest circuit court in the entire world. The entire world, gentlemen. Literally. You’ve got your court files back there.” He gestured behind him toward the rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling metal filing stacks. “Tens of thousands of court files, gent
lemen.”

  Lou looked to where he’d gestured. There were at least a dozen clerks moving up and down those aisles, most pushing metal carts filled with files. Occasionally, one would stop along the way to remove a file from the stacks or replace a file in the stacks. It reminded Lou of the vast underground government storage facility in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  The assistant probate court clerk turned back to them. “What can I say, gentlemen?” He sighed and placed his hands on the waist-high counter that separated the clerks and their files from the public. “Sometimes a probate file goes missing.”

  The clerk drummed his fingers on the counter. “Sometimes the file gets itself misplaced. Sometimes, well, gentlemen, sometimes the file gets itself stolen.”

  “Stolen?” Ray shook his head. “Who would steal a court file?”

  “Who, you ask?” The assistant probate court clerk gave a weary chuckle. “Well, sir, a judge cannot hear a case, cannot issue a ruling on the merits, cannot even enter a continuance, without the file. Alas, lawyers are aware of that.” He turned to Lou. “Am I correct, counselor?”

  If this guy were a steer, Lou thought, he’d have the word PATRONAGE branded on his hip.

  “Let us conjure the following scenario,” the assistant probate clerk said, pausing to purse his lips. “A particular member of the bar is not quite ready for the trial call but he fears that the judge will refuse to grant him yet another request for continuance. What to do, eh? How to deal with this conundrum? As I say, sometimes the court file gets itself lost. Around here—”

  He paused to chuckle.

  “—around here, we call that a five-fingered continuance.”